Pieces Of The Puzzle: The Building Blocks of a Story by Trish Wylie

Be sure to read the bottom of the blog post – Trish has a signed copy of One Night with the Rebel Billionaire for someone who comments! ~Amy

by Trish Wylie, author of One Night With The Rebel Billionaire (Harlequin Presents, June 2009)

Every story has a beginning that starts before the first page. It’s that first moment of inspiration that leads to the next idea and the next and so on until suddenly you find yourself in someone else’s world, telling their story while more pieces of the puzzle start to slot together. One Night With The Rebel Billionaire didn’t start out with that title. Few books ever do to be honest. It had the working title The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea. But it’s a story that didn’t start with a title either. As so many of my books do; it started with pictures.  Then there were quotes that started to add an extra something to the characters I loved by the time the story was told. Everything added together really helped turn this book into something a little bit special I think. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Jensen Ackles -- talk about inspiration!

Not that we’re at all shallow in this business, but the vast majority of my stories are all about the hero. There’s probably a certain element of voyeurism in that. Because just like the reader, there’s the option for the writer to let loose with a little fantasy and imagine themselves in the heroines shoes. After all, how can I expect my heroine to fall madly in love with my hero if I don’t want him myself? With that in mind Adam Bryant was born with my usual fictional pre-requisites of tall and deliciously sexy with great eyes. That’s the shallow part. What caught me off-guard as I told this story was how deep he became and how much sexier he was because of it. I don’t know where that came from. Actually, that’s a lie, I do — but I’ll get to that part of the puzzle in a minute. With this picture I had a visual of my hero to work with, I gave him a name, I had a darkly lit picture of him shirtless in my collection that led to the first scene of him skinny-dipping on a moonlit beach when my heroine first meets him, and as the other pieces of the puzzle began to slot into place he became one heck of a guy. I want one. Preferably gift wrapped…

Actress Allison Mack

Then came my heroine, and the picture that suggested she was more sexually confident than she is in the story. First and foremost she had to be likable. Whereas heroes may be the hot guys who fulfill a huge chunk of the fantasy quota in a romance and draw the reader in to the story, the heroine can be tricky. She’s much more likely to be universally hated than the hero in my experience, and therefore likely to alienate the reader. I wanted her to be self-confident but at the same time I wanted her to have the same sense of vulnerability as every woman on the planet. We’ve all been there with a guy after all. Laying your heart on the line is one of the biggest leaps of faith any of us take. Roane Elliott was named after a mystical creature of the sea. I did the same thing with Merrow in His Mistress, His Terms and it helped add to the fairy dust when I was writing that book, so yes, I did name Roane on purpose to try and tap into the same kind of fairy dust inspiration wise. Thankfully, it worked. When I added the location of the book to the puzzle, her name made even more sense. What that location also did was add to her personality. Why? Well we’ll get to that next.

I have a thing about island settings. There’s something incredibly magical about them. I first experienced that sense of magic when I used Valentia Island off the West Coast of Ireland as the setting for one of my Romance line books: Bride Of The Emerald Isle. For One Night With The Rebel Billionaire I took myself across the Atlantic to Martha’s Vineyard, another island with a magical history all of it’s own. It ticked the box for the rich and famous straight away — one of the things we love most in a Presents, right? I wish I could say I got to research The Vineyard the same way I did Valentia – in person – but the pictures I found and the history I researched was more than enough to make me fall just as much in love with it as I did Valentia. One of the most poignant things about an island is it’s isolation. Surrounded by the sea, it seems detached in a figurative sense as well as the literal. The sea becomes a focal point for the people who live there, both in the past and the present. So immediately my characters became tied to that history, with Adam having links to a schooner captain who sailed from there in days gone by. He was tied to the island in that sense, which raised the question of why he had left it and stayed away for twelve years, which then led to the question of what brought him back.

When it came to Roane it was different, even if her name tied her to the sea. She didn’t have the same history with the island that Adam did, but it was her home, the place she loved so much she had never left it beyond the trips she makes as a part of her work. Because how do people get to The Vineyard? Well they can drive and take the ferry, but many of the wealthy inhabitants and summer home owners fly there. So suddenly my heroine was a pilot, a modern day/next generation version of her father — who had worked on the Bryant Estate and at one point been the equivalent of the family chauffeur, similar to the father of the heroine in the movie Sabrina. With that thought in mind, my hero now had a brother in the same way there were two brothers in that movie. Though in fairness that brother already existed, because he’d made a brief appearance in a short story I did for a national newspaper as part of the Mills & Boon Centenary celebrations. What that brother did during the creative stages was give Adam his last name and part of his family. What One Night With The Rebel Billionaire did was give Jake — Adam’s younger brother and the hero from Million Dollar Mistress – more of a story than there was room for in 1,500 odd words. And it gave Roane a best friend, the brother figure she had grown up with and who cared about her, so that it would cause conflict when the black sheep of the family returned and it looked like he might break her heart.

Having Roane as a pilot also gave me some scope for contrast between the innocence she has from living a fairly sheltered life on the island (that would lead to her lack of self-confidence when she feels so shaken up by Adam), with the confidence she had at the controls of a plane (where she is in control of her environment). I talked to fellow author Donna Alward online via MSN Messenger about planes (since her husband works with them) and during the course of that conversation realized just how sexy planes are; words like power and thrust leading to the kind of smutty conversation that set my imagination on fire between raucous bouts of laughter. How could I add to the tension in that cockpit when Adam and Roane were mid-air? Easy. Suddenly I had a hero who was afraid of flying. Out of that realization came a quote from Kerouac: ‘My witness is the open sky‘. A quote my hero used to answer a question. Adam, it turned out, was a man of few words, particularly when trying to hide something or when placed in a situation where he was out of his comfort zone — i.e.: the plane. One quote led to another, from Kerouac to Voltaire, until I suddenly realized I was dealing with a lot more depth than I’d initially anticipated. I had a hero who wasn’t just smart, he was super-smart. Genius level I.Q. smart. It was another nice contrast with my heroine. Roane might not be as smart as Adam, but she feels things, she empathetic, described as a ‘glass half-full’ kinda gal. Adam is a thinker, he’s analytical, everything is hidden beneath the surface and thought through from every angle and permutation. So how was my poor heroine going to figure this guy out? She was a tad out of her depth after all…

Jensen Ackles looking pensive...

Back to the picture collection and I had one where my hero inspiration (Jensen Ackles for the uninitiated and may I just say — YUM) was looking pensive. Not only did this picture lead to a scene in a street café in New York, he’s wearing a ring, has little bands around his wrist. Maybe I could use those to help my heroine out? The items of ‘jewellery’ people wear often have personal significance to them. They’re clues. All Roane needed was an ‘in’ — a kind of doorway she could step through — so this seemed like the perfect opportunity.  Each of the things Adam wore then had a story to go with them. They meant something. As Roane discovered each of those things she learned something about Adam and the kind of man he was. When they were put together with some of the things he said it would allow her to get to know him, and each one of those stories were tied to family in some way or another, which led me to the reason Adam had come back to The Vineyard after so many years. The theme of family runs through a lot of my stories. Maybe it’s partly because I’m Irish, but to me a love story is intrinsically tied to family. It’s not just that through our family, and our upbringing, our personalities begin to form, it’s that a love story is the seedling of a new family. If these two people end up with the happily ever after we expect they become family, their families joined together to become a larger family. In a way, the foundations of that were already there with these two. Remember Roane is linked to the Bryant family through more than her employment, and it’s through her Adam begins to reconnect with his estranged father, playing chess the way they used to when he was a kid – the one thing he remembers fondly from his childhood and a cerebral game fitting for such a smart guy I thought. It’s while Adam hears an unsuspecting Roane read Dickens to his ailing father that another quote is added to Adam’s long list — one that helps make sense of what happens between Roane and Adam and one of my favourite quotes for many reasons.

‘That was a memorable day for me, because it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different it’s course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.‘

The one memorable day in One Night With The Rebel Billionaire is without a doubt the moment Roane discovers Adam skinny dipping on the beach in the moonlight. We might not all get so lucky when it comes to that kind of a discovery, but we all have our share of memorable days, don’t we? That first link in the long chain of events. It’s the same with this book. There was a long chain of events before and during the creation of the story, pieces of the puzzle, building blocks that added together to make it one of the most memorable books I’ve ever written. As is so often the case it also came with a piece of music I listened to while I was writing. In this case it was a track by Five For Fighting called 100 years, and when you see this video on YouTube, you can see where the family theme comes alive there too. For me it became Adam’s theme song and it’s one that not only can be linked to the Dickens quote, but to us as well. Writers will talk a lot about common universal themes and how they’re a big part of a love story because we’ve all experienced the ups and downs of falling in love. Add a sexy hero, a magical location and a heavy dose of the sensuality we all adore in a Presents and well… it was apparently enough for Romantic Times to choose One Night With The Rebel Billionaire as a Top Pick for June…

When Roane Elliott meets a naked stranger on the private beach of the Bryant estate, she can’t decide if she should report him for trespassing or stay to admire his perfection. She soon learns the man is no stranger; he’s Adam Bryant, the charismatic son of her employer. After more than a decade away, he’s home to make amends with his ailing father, and Adam won’t be leaving before he and Roane discover all that could happen between them. This terrific tale is awash in passion and sensuality. The hot and sexy hero will make your heart beat faster.  – Sandra Garcia-Myers , Romantic Times

So there you go, that’s One Night With The Rebel Billionaire and how it came to be. It was a wonderful writing experience and I really hope anyone who reads it enjoys it as much as I enjoyed writing it. To read an excerpt of the book you can visit my website at www.trishwylie.com

So do you have one memorable day in a long chain of events? A brand new extended family you adore thanks to your partner? Thoughts on island settings or Martha’s Vineyard? How about heroes with high I.Q.’s  — does it add to the sexiness? A random commenter will win a signed copy of One Night with the Rebel Billionaire!